id entity of the id iots
By shag carpet bomb • Jul 14th, 2009 • Category: Identity Politicsthe greek work, idiote, means private, iirc.
i was thinking of ids and idiotes because i was thinking of identity politics, reading this thread that amber pointed to:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/07/11/ad-hominems-etc/
i didn’t read all the details as to what went on, surely not to be in any position to decide who i agree with and who i don’t, and who i both agree and disagree with, and etc.
there was something piny said in comments, though, that made me pause:
I’m not sure I agree. That is, I think that, “You’re not really trans, so you need to shut the fuck up and let trans people take the lead in this,” is valid. I did gain some knowledge of the nuts and bolts of transition. During the years I was in transition, I paid a lot of attention to trans stuff because it was pretty central to my life. And when I transitioned back, I did get a taste of actual gender dysphoria. And now I exist in a category that shares some things with trans. Still, that’s not quite the same thing–and right now, as someone who got to transition from trans manhood to cis womanhood, I am in a position of privilege relative to people who went there but not back again.
is it valid?
take the lead in what, exactly? in deciding what’s considered bigoted?
it’s really fucked up id politics.
amber mentioned something about wanting to write a post, “working class doesn’t make you pure.”
neither does any other identity category and, yet, there’s something about id politics that seems to make people want to believe it does. oh, they know, abstractly and intellectually, that it doesn’t. but they don’t understand it in the gut. the game of more oppressedor than though keeps playing itself out.
if you are in a position of privilege, then you can’t speak to anything relating to a position of being oppressed.
it’s this bizarre either/or. it’s the paper scissors rock thing. all over again.
the identity doesn’t mean anything, in the end. it’s the political practice. it is what you are doing. it’s not sitting in some little pod of identity, magically imbued with the ability to say and speak to being oppressed that is somehow free of the ability to reinscribe that oppression. your identity in that little pod isn’t a form of deliverance from being trapped inside ideology. your identity, your id-iote-ness, your privacy pod of ooeey gooey chooey id-entity — your id-being — doesn’t mean your are free of ideology.
and yet people treat this id-entity — this id-being — as a playing card. There! Take that! I won! I have a get out of the straightjacket of ideology free card. I pass go and collect $200 and everything I say is magically not racist if I’m a person of color, not sexist if I’m a woman, not cis-sexist if I’m trans, not heterosexist if I’m lesbian.
the shock, the horror! someone who is trans gendered actually said something that was cissexist.
oh.
my.
god.
it’s where it all falls apart. it’s the horror that someone did what voz did. slung some cis-sexist horse puckey piny’s way:
She’s bringing up my transitioned status in order to insult me. I am an unmasculine man, a implicitly damaged woman, a coward who couldn’t handle a changed sex, and–somehow simultaneously–a poser who should never have considered herself trans in the first place. Besides being so much horseshit, it’s mean-minded and unjust. And maybe I’m appropriating here, but these double binds seem very familiar.
yeah. and?
if anyone really believed oppression was structural, that it was embedded in the very strucutural bones that consititute this society, then why the fucking shock?
if you really believed that no one can escape ideology, that the fantasy of id-entity (id-being) outside of ideology was just, indeed, fantasy, then no one should be surprised.
no one should feel betrayed.
but everyone is.
sorts.
but more interestingly still is that it all founders on… no, i think I mean it all exposes, like film being exposed to the grueling light of day after staying up all night, drinking coffee and writing — that horrible, eye pain light — it exposes the privatized politics upon which id-entity politics ultimately rests.
politics is the pod id-entity, that’s where everything happens, in just sitting there, being the thing you are. line them all up, the multitudes: white. woman. bisexual. middle class income. manual labor job. cissexual. blind. grew up poor. over 50. under 25. faggot. latino. guatamalen. super rich. colonized country. iranian emigre. well-educated. ADHD. bi-racial. poor.
identity tickets.
id-entity tickets. private being tickets.
these are my politics. i contain multitudes in my pod. oppressed when i roll in my pod this way, oppressor when I roll the other way.
i don’t actually have to be engaged in political practices. i dont’ have to think about how my actions inform my thinking. i just have to be — and I am me — and I am political. little ol’ me in my pod me.
i am trans, therefore whatever i say, bow to me.
i am cissexual, therefore whatever i say, well, i shouldn’t be saying at all, least wise not when it comes to anything trans.
because the politics that comes from the pod, these politics mean that what i say — my id- tickets account for more, by their very id-entity, private being, than could anything something without that id-entity could ever say.
shag carpet bomb is
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Exactly. Oppression Olympics all over again.
The either/or bugs me because, as we’re SUPPOSED to understand (”we” being people who are interested in social justice or whatever you want to call it), priviege is a matrix, it is not linear. Sure, it’s not disingenuous to say, men have male privilege so they should probably recognize and listen to the fact that women talk with authority that they do not about the experience of being a woman. But every woman’s experience of being a woman won’t be the same - due to other privielges and oppressions she has!
And I have noticed often in these “debates” in the blogosphere that often “privilege” gets used as an accusation. “You’re privileged!” Well, and you’re NOT, in some way shape or form? And that sets privilege up as something that is a character flaw, something that the individual CHOOSES and can get rid of by scrubbing really hard w/ the right kind (fair trade, and organic, surely) of soap.
More to say but gotta run for now.
isn’t this an unconscious (purposive, though it may be, so maybe thoughtless is better) attempt to depersonalize the political. It’s a been there done that attitude that sounds to me very flaneur, bourgeois. The idea that I have been there so I have some stake in IT is total horseshit. It’s colonial, for sure.
But I get the feeling reading your post and and quotes and checking out the original material that there is a thoughtless depersonalization going on. Having a stake? Showing a ticket? This is the need to possess the identity I want in order to experience the being dispossessed that the oppressed experience. It’s idolatry. It’s certainly nothing more than the planned production of an outward appearance from which to speak to others about that thing rather than confront yourself. Maybe I am thinking about authenticity here. But saying “I am in a position of privilege relative to people who went there but not back again” is really strange.
As if somebody can be in more than one place at the same time in discourse. Which if the personal is political would be impossible. But to depersonalize the political and to compartmentalize experience and to aggressively cultivate a space within the discourse to speak from about some other place you’ve been…well, it’s colonial and it’s no longer personal. It’s dialectical, maybe. Certainly not diatactical. It doesn’t consider itself or how it constructed itself. It considers a position.
anyway, fun post.
hi i’ve never commented here before but you’re in my google reader and i like your blog
i read feministe sort of regularly, i don’t really know why but it’s partially because the comments annoy me and you’ve pretty much explained why they’re so grating. and on the other side of it (maybe?), what you see in the comments all the time is this sort of groveling that happens, “ooh, i’m so sorry, i guess i should ‘check my privilege’” “thank you sooooooo much for writing this, i can never really understand (because of my privilege) but you’ve brought me so much closer,” or pre-apology for your post in case it offends someone, because half of the discussion is meta-discussion over how the privileged should behave toward the sensitive oppressed person. it goes beyond civility and listening into like, worshipping the oppressed for all the knowledge they can bring you, but it’s not really doing anything. of course there’s something to be said for personal experience, whatever, but as amber said it’s not this binary thing, and privilege is not a removable character flaw we can just learn away. and i’m going to pre-apologize and hope this won’t be misunderstood as a hatred of political-correctness or something! i’d just like to see us all act like normal human beings toward each other.
gary — what do you mean by “depersonalize the political”? i’m not familiar with the phrase. i’m familiar with “the personal is political” which derives from the original phrasing, from carrol hanisch, “there are no personal solutions at this time.”
http://www.perdigiorno.net/manifesto/personalpolitical1969.pdf
so i’m curious how to think of this differently. would it be better to have a personalized political?
amber — in some of the literature i’ve read, and sometimes in political organizing — people are fond of trying to overcome the problem by saying something like this: being a woman doesn’t mean that you automatically ‘get’ how sexist oppression is operating in your life, and it doesn’t mean you are incapable of reinscribing that oppression every minute of the day either. so, just because you’re a woman, who happens to live in this matrix of oppressions, with a bundle of oppressions and privileges unique to her, it doesn’t follow that whatever you say, it’s utter truth.
e.g., just because a white middle class professional het able-bodied woman says that something is sexist or that someone said something sexist, it doesn’t mean that she is right.
generally, people have liked to claim that it is women involved in political struggle against sexism that will likely have a better grasp of what it takes to eradicate sexist oppression.
as an example, i think back to the burqa-gate wars. remember how people who write their women friends and acquaintances from hijab wearing countries and religions and say, “What to you think? do you think the fuss made by these american women of color, none of whom wear hijab, about the photoshopped image of jessica valenti in a burqa is colonialist? racist?”
these women, asked to do the work of representation, would be quoted in the debate and they would say for their interlocutors that the american women of color making a fuss were just inconsequential people, laughable really. what right did they have to speak about the issue. they don’t wear hijab! they aren’t muslim. they aren’t from iran, or pakistan, or afghanistan, or saudi arabia. what did they know! Personally, the women standing in for all women from cultures, religions, and nations where hijab predominates, would tell her friend or acquaintance that she thought the photo was hilarious. what is the big deal? who cares? Silly people.
The response to that at the time, from Brownfemipower, was to argue that they were articulating the concerns of activist women in Afghanistan, women who were, themselves, struggling on their own behalf, using their own voices, articulating the very critiques of western feminist burqa discourse that BFP had originally enunciated.
The fall back was to say, “It’s not the pod identity, it’s not the thing, it’s not identity as product. Rather, it’s identity, politicized by political practice, political struggle. Identity that emerges *from* the activity of being engaged in activities designed to dismantle sexism, racism, colonialism.”
If we are going to support what colonized women of color say , then we support what is said by colonized women of color in engaged in anti-sexist, anti-oppression, anti-colonialist, anti-racist struggle.
It always seems such an easy answer. I used to say it myself all the time. It made sense to me. But then I started paying more attention to the discord inside those very groups. I also started seeing what happened online, when people were less likely to keep their thoughts to themselves, when they used life online as a way to vent in a way they might not to do so face-to-face.
not to say we didn’t have huge debates. the anti-radioactive waste dump campaign was often fraught with huge wars over tactics and strategy, and all very identity-based: rural poor identity vs. small town professional-managerial identity. they people who wanted to work outside the system vs the people who wanted to work within it. the feminist circles I worked in had fewer debates, possibly because we were often engaged in specific actions, with time-bound goals, so our focused was zeroed in on getting the thing done. (there is lot less wrangling over big picture theory stuff as you’re leading into sex 2.0 than when you’re coming down from it and ramping up for the next one. people are too focused for highminded debate when the conference is 5 weeks away. :)
but online, it highlighted for me just how weak, incomplete, and unrealistic were the mantras that political practice is the precursor to chainging people’s minds, that it is some kind of process that magically unites people around some goal, or that theory emerges unproblematically, uncontestedly from engagement in political practice.
well, that’s about all the spew i have in me at the moment. i have a house to clean and bills to pay.
I remember Burqa-gate but I was more of a casual spectactor to it. I didn’t directly participate in any of the conversations and didn’t follow all of them, so I don’t necessarily know *all* the details. I’m trying to understand what you wrote above and forgive me for being dense… so you’re saying BFP et al were arguing that they were representing the struggles of women in Afghanistan and other countries where women wear hijab, while the women in those countries (when they had the chance to respond) were saying, no, actually, we don’t really give a shit about this?
Is that right or did I read it completely wrong?
uhm, i will gab more about the depersonalized political shortly. I am turning 40 in Korea and am drinking much soju and teaching middle school students and then going to germany and belgium. late july and august are nuts here with people leaving and new folks showing up and the kids not being permitted to take a day off.
shortly.
hi reader — i’m really sorry that i didn’t see your comment. i just happened to notice it when i spied this category called “pending”.
i’m a bad blogger in the sense that i sometimes forget i have this blog and i just haven’t felt like exploring the new wordpress format and sometimes i accidentally shut down the mailbox that contains email about new comments.
ah well. i always feel a little bad about that. but, srsly, blogging like you should — as an engaged person who interacts with commenters and wants to have a discussion — it’s a serious hobby and should be treated as such.
i thought a distinction i read recently — between blogger (who engages) and writer who blogs (and doesn’t engage) — was interesting.
anyway. today: I am vacating! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeddy whee dee whee!